Seite - (000129) - in Knowledge and Networks

122 organizational society (Perrow, 1991).4 They are created by the social organization of these milieus and end up, under conditions that remain to be spelled out, restruc- turing these milieus, taking some members somewhere and others nowhere. Dynamics of OMRT are not simply a recursive and alternating movement between two separate poles influencing each other while competing in doing the same thing. OMRT dynamics involve more complex evolution because they have an impact on fundamental social processes. These processes all have a relational dimension, and all depend on relational infrastructure that facilitates their deployment (Lazega, 2001, 2003, 2012). A neostructural approach to the relationship between behavior and position in the social structure takes these dynamics into account and provides this endogenous understanding of social change and system stability.5 From this perspective, posi- tion in the structure is not a static place in a static order. It results from specific social dynamics. These dynamics can be approached through the notion and mea- surements of relational infrastructures, i.e.social forms in the sense meant by Simmel (1908/2009). At least two such forms are needed to position actors in the structure, describe their attempts to modify their opportunity structure, and explain the deployment of generic social processes that help them, as members of a collec- tive, deal with the pitfalls of collective action (e.g., freeloading and crowding in the production and consumption of collective goods). The two social forms are niches and status, which represent underlying social differentiations, horizontal and verti- cal, in the social space. It is not surprising that status as a social form is key to the deployment of social processes. In general, sociological theory, status refers to a member’s relative position in the formal hierarchy of the group, as well as in its internal networks of exchanges (Blau, 1964; Hughes, 1945; Lenski, 1954; Merton, 1957). Members’ status can be understood as a translation of their present and past contributions to the group’s cooperative system into a right to participate actively, and sometimes to lead. Sociological classics have long stressed the salience of many dimensions of social status and social approval. Weber (1924), for example, distin- guished between three—economic (based on the control of production apparatus), social (based on honor and prestige derived from birth and from human capital, or education), and political (based on control of the state apparatus)—which can over- lap in stable economic conditions. 4 The term organizational society has several dimensions. According to Perrow (1991), it means that large-scale public or private organizations “absorb” (p. 726) societal functions that can be performed by communities. It also means that a system of interdependent organizations interlinked at the mesolevel in a multilevel network shapes the opportunity and constraint structure of citizens by coordinating, for example, various forms of opportunity-hoarding (Tilly, 1998). Lastly, the term organizational society is a metaphor for the tendency of individuals to act at the individual and organizational levels simultaneously and for the observation that domination (in the sense meant by Weber, 1924) is linked to the control of organizations as “tools with a life of their own” (Selznick, 1949, p. 24). 5 Contemporary neostructuralism is different from the structuralism of the 1960s in that the former draws on a theory of individual and collective action to articulate structure, culture, and agency (Archer, 1988; Lazega & Favereau, 2002). E. Lazega